Mission and Philosophy

Past VISIONS Program Director Attends White House Round Table for "Champions of Change"

Apr 29, 2011

"What is going to change the world today is the same thing that has changed it in the past: an idea, and the service of dedicated individuals committed to that idea.”

~Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps founder

Last month past VISIONS program director (Dr.) Joby Taylor was invited to an inaugural roundtable meeting at the White House for President Obama's "Winning the Future: Champions of Change" initiative. Joby joined a small group of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, all civic leaders in their communities, from around the country for a conversation with senior White House staff about service and civic engagement.

Joby forged the foundation for VISIONS community service program in Guadeloupe as its Program Director from 1997 through 2000. He is a dear friend and occasional advisor to us. Joby, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Gabon, Africa, is Director of the Shriver Peaceworker Fellows Program and Affiliate Faculty, Language Literacy & Culture at the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus. Joby’s profile and a short video are featured on the White House website.

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Remembering Sargent Shriver, Peace Corps Founder and Service Leader

Jan 27, 2011

"What is going to change the world today is the same thing

that has changed it in the past: an idea, and the service of

dedicated individuals committed to that idea."

~ Sargent Shriver

Author: Joby Taylor, Director Shriver Peaceworker Center and former VISIONS summer director

Sargent Shriver sits at the tip top of my list of great leaders who were also great human beings. His resume doesn't include "President" but sometimes, on a down day, just musing on that what-might-have-been scenario brings a smile. He's a true hero.

In a career spanning the second half of the twentieth century, Sargent Shriver created and led an array of programs that met our most challenging issues with courage, compassion, and creativity. The Peace Corps, Legal Services for the Poor, VISTA, Head Start, Job Corps, Upward Bound, Community Action, Special Olympics, and others remain among our nation's most effective programs for engaging citizens, transforming lives, and leading social change. Our own Shriver Center at UMBC has been leading this charge in his home state of Maryland for nearly two decades already, and the Shriver Peaceworker Program is proudly continuing his legacy in Baltimore, where I imagine Sarge standing alongside the City's great citizen sons like Frederick Douglass.

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Vietnam: Service Work with Ties to History

Jan 10, 2011

One of VISIONS Vietnam service projects can be viewed through a time lens, as a tapestry of time weaving past and present, cause and effect, conflict and repair. Over 35 years ago, during the Vietnam War, Agent Orange was sprayed from the air onto the crops and jungle foliage of Vietnam. Agent Orange is a chemical defoliant whose debilitating health effects continue to be researched and more clearly understood. A July 2010 news story reported an ongoing medical study on lingering health issues of Vietnam War veterans. Veterans who were routinely exposed to Agent Orange are three times more likely to succumb to Graves' disease and other autoimmune diseases than veterans who had no exposure.

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Some Philosophies of Our Summer Programs

Oct 20, 2010

"Airplane Rules" ~ What are are they?

All schools, camps, travel and academic programs, certainly teen volunteer programs, have clear "road maps" for participants--guidelines, protocols, do's and don'ts, and inside lingo for them. VISIONS participants quickly acquire a small vocabulary for these. A buddy is the other person you must have with you before you can leave home base, the inside perimeter of the facility where we live, after you've gotten permission from a staffer, a counselor, to go for a run or to the corner store or a local friend's house nearby. No one leaves home base alone, without a buddy. Circle, bilan, kanatapi, allyu, semble, comunidad, harambe are all names for the coming together of a community so that individuals may speak their minds and hearts. Every VISIONS group sets time aside each week to come together to voluntarily share insights and reactions to the days. Which word used depends on what culture our participants are living in temporarily.

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Teen Leadership Organization Celebrates 20 Years

Oct 18, 2010

VISIONS Partner Celebrates 20th Anniversary ~ Congratulations, Summer Search!

A remarkable nonprofit recently celebrated its first 20 years. Summer Search "is a high-impact program that gives low-income students the opportunities and support they need to transform their lives, achieve their own potential, and create change as role models and everyday leaders."
VISIONS has partnered with Summer Search for two decades, providing program spaces for their kids among our annual scholarships. Philosophically and practically VISIONS feels a deep affinity for Summer Search, and their kids enrich our enrollment every summer.

Summer Search kids are closely mentored year-round. Linda Mornell, Summer Search's founder and former CEO, realized early on that it wasn't enough to get low income kids out of their neighborhoods and into outdoor / wilderness trips, academic sojourns, or programs of community service abroad for a few weeks in the summer. They needed real support before and after their trips to help them process and integrate the new experience in an environment radically different from anything they'd known.

Mornell created an initial intake interview model and an ambitious

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The Serious Scope of VISIONS' Service Projects

Sep 26, 2010

Among teen community service programs, VISIONS can be distinguished by a few ongoing, fundamentally integrated elements. One is the ambition of our community service projects for teens. Historically, the sophistication of VISIONS projects is impressive, specifically, the construction service.

In the Caribbean, for example, where we build to hurricane specifications, more than a few of the schools our teen volunteers have built serve as the communities’ hurricane shelters. All of the houses and schools built by VISIONS participants in the British Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic are intact to this day, having withstood hurricanes and tropical storms.

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A Message to Parents

Jun 28, 2010

Be Here Now – What We Believe and Why

Thousands of teens travel every summer to far away places and experience things that their parents never imagined when they were teenagers. With our children far away, some parents desire regular updates from the field; some parents have even come to expect daily postings from the program. The Internet brings instant communication and along with it the expectation of real-time news about what our teens are doing in their programs. Why not? We've got the tools, let's use them, right?

These days there are summer programs that post daily updates, video clips and blogs on their websites. Participants may have steady access to e-mail or can call home whenever they wish. VISIONS is not such a program.

I understand the desire to know about your child's far-away life. I am the mother of a daughter just a few years out of her teens who traveled to Australia and Ecuador in the summers between high school years and then, barely a month after graduating high school, to the southernmost region of Chile as a Rotary International Exchange student.

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In Rwanda a Piece of VISIONS Helps a School Feel Like Family

Mar 7, 2010

Monique teaching Akilah Monique Schmidt directed VISIONS service programs abroad in Guadeloupe and at home in Montana. A poet, teacher and published author (her memoir Last Moon Dancing is the story of her Peace Corps years in Africa), Monique moved to Rwanda last November tobe Program Director for the Akilah Institute for Women, the first vocational and leadership training institute for young women in Rwanda. Akilah provides quality education and vocational training to young women who are unable to attend university. The women spend a year getting grounded in English language, computer skills, and introductory hospitality classes. Then they and other young women from around Rwanda begin a two-year diploma program to learn vocational and technical skills for the hospitality and tourism industry.

Monique sends us emails regularly, always a mix of the profound and mundane as you’ll read here in some excerpts. You’ll also read how Monique is using VISIONS’s process for reflection (part of every VISIONS program) to good effect at Akilah.

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Blog Anyone? Perhaps a bit of Tweet? Shall we Skype?

Dec 9, 2009

"Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I've been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books...and have some excellent ideas for promotion.

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I'll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I'll ask if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Boraster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click "Endless," and under "Contacts" just list everyone you've ever met. It would be great if you could post at least 6,000 words every day until further notice...

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold...."

WHAAT?!!? Okay, it's a joke. These paragraphs open "Subject: Our Marketing Plan," which appeared in the October 19 issue of The New Yorker magazine. The piece is a hilariously tongue-in-cheek spoof on blogging and viral marketing, and the confounding convolution of it all, or at least it seems to me.

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ADVENTURE on our Service Programs

Apr 25, 2009

We take our service projects seriously, it's true. But we take our play equally (and pretty darned) seriously, too. The places VISIONS groups go offer splendid scenery, geography, wildlife and history. Always there's time, and every opportunity made, to re-charge our batteries by exploring and enjoying the outdoors.

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